by Liem Nguyen, Director of Corporate Communications — May 11, 2010
Our partners at Citrix and Microsoft are making it easier for Compellent Fluid Data storage users and channel partners to plan cloud computing projects. A few weeks ago, Compellent announced our work with Microsoft on the dynamic infrastructure toolkit for cloud computing. This week the Compellent team will be demonstrating more of our next-gen cloud technology support for both Citrix and Microsoft virtualization platforms at Citrix Synergy in San Francisco.
In Compellent booth no. 300 in the Moscone Center tomorrow May 12 through May 14, we’re going to showcase support for the next evolution of the Citrix Ready program: StorageLink version 2.2. The upcoming StorageLink 2.2 code from Citrix will include the Compellent Storage Adapter, which integrates provisioning, management and recovery of Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V virtual machines through the StorageLink interface.
The wow factor will be our demo for Site Recovery integration. It’s future technology from both Compellent and Citrix, which will automate setup and execution of disaster recovery of Citrix XenServer and Microsoft Hyper-V workloads. I can’t go into more detail right now but we’re working on enabling customers to integrate Compellent continuous snapshots and thin replication with Site Recovery.
Stay tuned for more official words from Citrix and Compellent. In the meantime, don’t miss our demonstrations of Compellent, Citrix and Microsoft cloud tech at Synergy.
If you can't make it to Synergy, here's a video demo that walks through some of the technical features of the StorageLink 2.2 GUI with Compellent integration. We'll have the second demo with Site Recovery next week.
Let us know if you're going to Synergy. If you're already using StorageLink or plan to use it with Site Recovery we'd love to hear from you.
by Compellent Technologies, — May 03, 2010
IT departments in the healthcare industry, from OEMs to frontline care providers, are facing profound pressure on their data center infrastructures. Mark Manning from McKesson tells his story, describing McKesson’s infrastructure before and after Compellent and why storage really does matter to the world of business.
9:02 am – Mark Manning, Chief Ditchdigger, for McKesson’s EnterpriseRx division is presenting on his infrastructure before and after his Compellent implementation.
9:04 am – EnterpriseRx is the McKesson flagship application for pharmacies. Most of McKesson’s customers are hospitals, outpatients, chain and individual pharmacies.
9:06 am – McKesson has invested heavily in technology to provide better customer service and improve staffing productivity.
9:07 am – There is an unbelievable amount of data out there – when the record comes in, when it goes out, who handled it, etc. There are a lot of improvements that can be made to enhance the customer experience, including things like email and accounting, laboratory data and compliance management.
9:08 am – All records need to be retained, nothing can be deleted. In addition, there’s a big shortage of pharmacists, so while data grows, it’s becoming harder for pharmacists to manage it all.
9:09 am – In 2009, less than 25 percent of US physicians utilized HER systems.
9:11 am – From the time you’re born to the time you die, you generate a lot of records. Every visit to the dentist office, the doctor office, etc., generates health and medical records.
9:15 am – Since 2005, EnterpriseRx has grown to 150 customers in 800 locations across 13 time zones. In 2008, EnterpriseRx had two EMC SANs and one StorageTek SAN. Storage management was at an all-time high, application performance was impacted, and EnterpriseRx was hit with availability issues.
9:18 am – In 2008, we had about 23 customers in about 300 stores. Our SANs were completely maxed out, and we were just throwing more and more storage at the system with very little forethought. Cracks started to develop.
9:20 am – The feeling was best described by a coworker of Mark’s: Imaging you’re in a cactus field, naked, and a tornado comes along…
9:21 am – We decided that we needed a solution that not only kept us afloat, but helps us and keeps us ahead of the competition.
9:22 am – McKesson’s technical needs included a solution that provided scalability, flexibility, restoration of individual databases, multi-site disaster recovery and cost savings from power and cooling.
9:23 am – McKesson’s human needs included manual ILM, quick and easy cloning, reductions in operating costs, idle redundancy and risks for more “hands off” time and more sleep! At the time, the division had 12 people in three locations.
9:26 am – McKesson’s customer service needs included excellence in customer service, quick and complete resolution of IT issues, high availability of customer data, the ability to react to customer requests, and technology partner who know, understand and deliver on McKesson’s demands.
9:28 am – As part of the IT upgrade process, McKesson:
- Conducted market research
- Consulted other business units and industry professionals
- Considered EMC, HP, NetApp, 3PAR and Compellent
- Performed a Proof-of-Concept on Compellent:
- Performance capabilities
- Survivability after failures
- Storage provision process
- Copilot customer service
- Backup, recovery and cloning
- Adding storage to array without downtime
- Automated ILM (Fast Track and Data Progression)
9:33 am – The installation process involved in using a customer to go live with the system. There was one minor issue that was taken care of in one day. McKesson and Compellent both said, “I do!” and surprisingly, even McKesson’s most risk-averse customers were rushing to the front of the line to make the switch. Mark migrated 37 TB of data within a week, and they immediately saw incredible results.
9:35 am – McKesson is in the honeymoon phase. The Compellent SAN collects usage data, can recover from disaster quickly, Enterprise Manager provides a report on how the system is working, and now Mark can spend time fishing with his son.
9:39 am – After an important restoration, other employees thought it was a miracle. Mark told them, “No…it’s Compellent.” Now, the IT team refers to BC and AC: Before Compellent and After Compellent.
9:41 am – McKesson continues to grow with Compellent. Customers continue to enjoy fast response times and on-time deliverables, McKesson is enjoying shorter development lead times, faster turn-around of solutions and fixes, and Copilot responses are over the top. In addition, Compellent continually asks for input and delivers on requests.
9:45 am – One time, Copilot found out that Mark’s team urgently needed some new parts that were not available locally. Copilot had a jet in the air with two of everything the team needed, including an engineer that day.
9:50 am – Mark says that Compellent can’t fly under the radar anymore.
9:51 am – Mark’s team manages 903 volumes across 532 of raw storage at three locations with three people.
9:54 am – Most people may not know this, but Mark said that EMC stands for “Easily Migrates to Compellent”!
9:56 am – Mark’s business unit president is proud of his Compellent installation. He’s happy to go against the grain.
by Bruce Kornfeld, Vice President of Marketing — October 14, 2009
Earlier today, SearchStorage.com, one of the most influential storage technology media outlets in the world, published an article asking, “Is data deduplication right for your primary storage infrastructure?” We at Compellent think this is an interesting and important question as some end-users have come to think that deduplication will solve all (or at least most) of their capacity issues, and the industry has responded in kind. Just look at EMC’s recent acquisition of Data Domain.
The issues the article raises about deduplication are important ones that should be considered before implementing the technology. For instance, dedupe in backup storage can be highly efficient (because backups are 90 percent repetitive from day to day), but the efficiency of dedupe drops when it’s applied to primary storage. Furthermore, as the article points out, dedupe in primary storage can reduce the performance of the entire system, especially in applications where data is constantly changing, like transactional databases. If data from live, online applications is deduped, it would first need to be “un-deduplicated” or “reconstituted” before being read, which seems like a lot of extra time and computing effort required to obtain what amounts to be very little storage space savings. In our discussions with end-users, it’s hard to find organizations actually using deduplication for active, primary applications.
In reality, a comprehensive strategy for reducing redundant data doesn’t have to center on deduplication technology. For instance, space efficient snapshot technology like our Data Instant Replay takes continuous snapshots of changed data at regular intervals (as frequently as every 15 minutes) and stores them on the SAN. Since they only capture changed blocks of data, these replays are relatively small, enabling customers to store a virtually unlimited number while requiring minimal storage capacity and having no impact on system performance. In the event of a data loss, admins can easily rollback to a snapshot and recover from that point in time in just a few mouse clicks. Many customers also use replays to test new applications without putting entire servers or storage systems at risk. If the SAN doesn’t require space pre-allocation for replays – which is another benefit of our Dynamic Block Architecture – organizations utilizing these technologies can be much more efficient.
Another way to achieve significant storage efficiencies is to deploy automated tiered storage at the block level, available in our Data Progression software. Data Progression automatically moves inactive blocks of data within active volumes from high-performance, high-cost tiers of storage (15K Fibre Channel drives or SSDs) down to lower-performance, lower-cost tiers (SATA drives). Data Progression also migrates these inactive blocks from RAID10 to RAID5 along the way. The overall result is fewer disk drives, more high-performance disks available for active data and reduced growth costs, since add-on storage is typically achieved with lower-cost SATA drives.
So with all of buzz around dedupe permeating the wishlists of data center admins everywhere, it’s important to remember that dedupe isn’t the only answer for reducing data storage needs and increasing storage efficiency in the data center. In case you’re wondering, if customers want to use dedupe for their backups with our SAN, we partner with CommVault for source-based dedupe and work with Exagrid for target-based dedupe.